We analyzed the ASRock Fatal1ty B85 Killer, a mid-range socket LGA1150 motherboard based on Intel B85 chipset. It is part of the Fatal1ty Killer series, which means it uses high-end audio and Ethernet chips. The motherboard also brings four SATA-600 ports and four USB 3.0 ports.

Today, here at OCinside.de we test the ASRock Fatal1ty FM2A88X+ Killer - a brand new Socket FM2+ motherboard with special gaming features, or rather killer features.The Socket FM2+ motherboard is backward compatible with Socket FM2, so we have tested it with an AMD Richland and AMD Trinity in addition to the latest AMD Kaveri processor.Not only the compatibility has been tested, but also the performance and the overclocking options with an AMD A10-7850K, A10-6800K and A10-5800K APU on the ASRock Fatal1ty FM2A88X+ Killer motherboard is compared.

Lately it seems I have been covering the smaller side of things in reviews. If you read any of them, you will know that I am not a big fan of the diminutive size of Micro and Mini anything when it comes to computing. The bigger the better has been my motto. Huge cases that could fit every feature you might ever want, plus the remains of Jimmy Hoffa, have been my focus for the last few years. Despite this, not too long ago I had the chance to experiment with some of the newer small offerings from Bitfenix and MSI in the form of the Prodigy M and the Z87I Micro ATX Gaming board. I freely admit that I had a change of heart.

To my surprise the performance difference between full size and snack size has been erased during this recent resurgence of the minuscule. Bitfenix is now giving me the chance to go even smaller with a Mini-ITX based Colossus M in an effort to fully rehabilitate my aversion to pint size PCs! If it is anything like the Prodigy M, they might just succeed. Let’s dig in and find out!

Some gamers spend a lot of time and money to find their ideal combination of mouse and gaming keyboard, not paying attention to the mousepad they are using. Most of the work is done by the mouse sensor but also the pad plays a crucial role. Today we will analyze the Control-RX from CM Storm.

Today we are going to look at one of the latest, and perhaps most interesting notebooks in Dell’s range, the XPS 12. This aluminum convertible Ultrabook offers a ‘flip and fold’ motion and features a Corning Gorilla glass screen with Full HD Display.

Small form factor, mini-ITX based computer systems are certainly not a perfect fit for everyone but EVGA’s Z87 Stinger tries to offer something for nearly every scenario. It is supposed to feel at home within everything from a compact LAN party friendly gaming PC, a multimedia focused HTPC or any of the countless other classic builds that call for mITX motherboards. While it may strive for excellence, the Stinger has some high expectations riding on relatively narrow shoulders since the competition in this bracket is fierce and EVGA’s history with motherboards is anything but consistent. Consumers demand a lot from these 17 square centimeter boards so EVGA will need to being their A-game this time around if they have any hope of differentiating their offering.

Much like ASUS and their $180 Z87-I Deluxe and $220 Republic of Gamers Maximus VI Impact, EVGA has spared no expense in building their Z87 Stinger to satisfy the needs of this very demanding and very vocal consumer group. That should be obvious from the moment its steep $210 price tag comes into focus.

It’s a little crazy to think that just a few years ago Fractal stormed the market with their Scandinavian designs. Now Fractal is a common name in the enthusiast scene. They were able to do this because they never compromise on their design philosophies and their high build quality. As it turns out, people want a good product at a reasonable price, who knew right? Well today, I have the chance to take a look at a case from their Arc series of cases that are designed for increased cooling while still giving you the “fractal” styling that we know and love. Specifically today, I will check out their Arc XL, their largest model. I’m excited to see what sets the Arc XL apart from the competition and from Fractals other product lines.

Comparisons of two mid-range graphics cards with one high-end VGA are almost always good for some really interesting results. Today we're having a look at what two GTX 760 graphics cards can do agains one mighty AMD Radeon R9 290X. Both configurations cost about the same and we're really curious to find out which setup is going to be quicker.

Does size really matter? On some human levels it might, though a different trend has been observed in the PC market over the last year. Compact is the key word, featuring mITX sized motherboards and idem ditto enclosures. These compact PCs are playing a more and more important role in every manufacturers' lineup: Mini PCs, NUCs, they are all amongst us now. For most users the bundled power is more than plenty as the size maters the most. Nevertheless combining the raw power of a desktop setup inside a mini sized housing is a step in another direction. Gigabyte is having big success with their Brix boxes, time to step up one level. Today we are going to test one of these Gigabyte supercharged versions: the BRIX Pro.

Gigabyte's recent motherboards, which are based on Intel Z87 chipset are certainly amongst the most interesting products you can buy these days. The Gigabyte G1.Sniper Z87 is a well equipped motherboard where the manufacturer must have thought a lot about what the feature list should look like. At a first glance it looks like this could be a truly compelling offer especially for gamers.

Smartphones these days are becoming more and more powerful as well as much more capable than they have been in the past. Today I have the chance to look at the HTC One M8. The HTC One M8 is the latest in the line of HTC One smartphones. The HTC One M8 features some of the latest and greatest tech out there, and if first impressions mean anything, I was impressed when I first picked it up...

The personal computing industry is a commodity market. In general, the fast turnover of technology allied with the unit volumes produced lends itself to minimal risk taking. The industry as a whole became what it is today through stardardization of design parameters, and a whole lexicon of acronyms allowed what was largely a domain for hobbyists to become components – compatible, interchangeable, standardized to the point where mass manufacture became viable.

The same commonality of design parameters which birthed the industry is also a driving ethos within product line evolution. Where incremental changes and imitation of an already successful design are low risk decisions, a profound change in design philosophy carries with it a greater possibility of financial uncertainty since increased research and development needs to translate into sales or brand elevation.

A profound change in design philosophy can also usher in a design icon.

When it comes to home networking there are a number of big names that come to mind and fortunately I have been able to put a number of products from these names to the test, however there has been one particular brand that I have been keen to get in touch with and establish a line of communications – namely Linksys. Believe it or not it is not always as simple as firing an email at someone and instantly getting products sent back in return as some may believe. After a few months of patiently waiting and after having a meeting with a few representatives from Linksys at this years CES in Las Vegas, I can finally say that I’m glad to have Linksys onboard and I look forward to having a good sniff through the stack of products that they have to offer.

Link some of the other big names in the consumer networking market – Netgear and TP-Link being just a couple of the other big names, Linksys have a massive following and also have a big history to back a successful line of products. After being formed in 1998, Linksys was bought out by Cisco Systems in 2003 and in the next ten years that followed, their name became synonymous with the WRT line of networking products. To put it in a simple way, if you was into your home networking, then Linksys’ WRT54G was the way to go – the OpenWRT project which was founded to develop the hacked router caused the popularity to explode to a new level. On a personal Level I have owned a number of Linksys routers over the years, in particular the WRT54g, WRT54Gs and the ADSL2+MUE modem amongst others. The power and flexibility that was on offer set these products head and shoulders above all else. In the more recent years, Linksys went under a second acquisition as Belkin then purchased the company in the early stages of the last year, ready to take them to the next level. Today Linksys is branded under its own name with the enthusiast and power user at the heart of their design, whilst Belkin branded items target the home and entry-level user.

Despite being limited by the capabilities of the SATA interface, many solid state drive manufacturers continue to innovate and introduce new products that improve on their elder siblings. For example, Micron recently released its M550 series of drives, which was an evolution of the previously released M500 series, but built around newer, 20nm NAND flash memory and featuring enhanced/updated firmware. The M550 proved to be an excellent all around performer, outpacing many competing products in a number of tests, but again, operating within the limitations of its SATA interface.

Today, Micron is at it again, though the drives we’ll be showing you here are targeted at a different audience. The new Micron M500DC series of drives are designed for enterprise/data center type workloads and strike a balance between performance and endurance...

About this time last year, we were reviewing the Crucial M500 960GB This was the first drive to really put 1 TB of flash storage at a price where consumers could realistically own one. In the past year, Micron released the enterprise-focused M500 under their brand. They are now back with the M500DC that shares its roots with both of those drives.

By using the base architecture of the M500, Micron is able to add enterprise features to a drive that is consistently selling for less than $0.50/GB. Considering the lowest cost enterprise SSDs are close to $1/GB, this gives Micron a lot of room to be price competitive. Micron does not publish pricing for their enterprise SSDs, instead they point you to distributors to get pricing at volume. But, in our conversations, they heavily implied that they would very competitive.

Along with the Naos 7000, Mionix has also launched an ambidextrous model baptized Avior 7000. This product shares all the good features from the Naos, including the Avago ADNS-3310 IR-LED Optical Sensor which tracks with a maximum DPI of 7000, 128Kb of on-board memory for storing profiles, 4 rubber coating layers or illumination control via software.

The $700 MSI R9 290X Lightning is MSI's latest flagship card geared toward overclockers and enthusiasts. It comes with a large overclock out of the box, higher than any other custom R9 290X available today. The board is cooled by a large triple slot, triple fan cooler that yields excellent temperatures.

Pure Acoustics are a US company, starting up 20 years ago which has recently widened its reach to many other parts of the world (even Sweden). With an equally widening array of audio products on offer covering home and portable equipment they are worth keeping an eye (and two ears) out for.

Everyone likes a sing-a-long in our family, so today I’ll be reviewing one of the portable karaoke / Bluetooth speaker systems from Pure – the MCP50. I’ll also be taking a separate look at its big brother – the MCP100 very soon. The good thing about reviewing something everyone in the family can use it that I can give a variety of opinions. I’ve had the MCP50 for a couple of weeks now and it’s been used in a variety of different situations so it’s really been put through its paces.

At CES earlier this year, one of the SSD vendors with a lot to show off was Plextor who had a number of new SSDs planned for early 2014. Among the SSDs they showed were the Plextor M6e, a M.2 form factor PCIe SSD, the Plextor M6S, a new 2.5″ SATA 6Gb/s SSD, and the Plextor M6M, a new mSATA SSD. So far, we’ve already had a chance to check out Plextor’s first M.2 SSD aimed at the retail market, the Plextor M6e, and was highly impressed with the drive, so now we focus our attention to the the rest of Plextor’s lineup coming out this month.

The rest of the Plextor M6 lineup includes the Plextor M6S and the Plextor M6M which are virtually identical drives with the exception that the M6S is in the 2.5″ SATA form factor while the Plextor M6M is in the mSATA form factor. Plextor is also planning to launch a M6 Pro, which will be the flagship 2.5″ SATA form factor drive sometime later this year.

USB flash drives have been around for quite a long time and are great for easily storing and transferring files. The mobile devices that we have these days have limited storage and with some you have the ability to add a USB storage, but with most devices this is not possible. Well SanDisk has come up with a great product that not only gives you USB storage but also wireless storage for your mobile devices as well. It is the SanDisk Connect Wireless Flash Drive, which looks like your ordinary flash drive, but also allows you to stream content wirelessly to up to 3 devices at once! Read on as we take a look...

The Radeon R9 290 GPU came out in November 2013, making it almost 6 months old, and while it isnât the top of the line model it still has some impressive specifications. Powered by a single 28nm AMD Hawaii GPU, it features 2560 Stream processors running at 947MHz, and 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5000MHz. Sapphire has taken those specifications and boosted them a little with their Overclocked edition. The Stream processors are running at 1030MHz, and the 4GB GDDR5 memory has been clocked to 5600MHz. Sapphire doesnât stop there, they have also added their Tri-X Cooling which features three fans rather than the standard two fans...

SilentiumPC is a fresh Polish company that was established in 2007. Today, we will take a look at their first Platinum PSU, the Supremo M1-700 with high efficiency, semi-passive operation for lower noise output, and a semi-modular cabling design.

The Silverstone Raven is a product line reserved for expressive case designs that allow Silverstone to try new things. For instance, the first Raven, RV01, was a large case that pushed the limits of positive air pressure cooling. That case also introduced us to the 90 degree motherboard mounting which later became a standard feature until the release of the Raven RV04. Up until then the Raven series kept improving on their 90 degree motherboard mounting by making the cases more efficient and more compact until they were no larger than a standard midtower.

In this review we will be looking at the new Raven RVZ01 from Silverstone. One of the latest trends in the enthusiast hardware world is to build high powered small form factor machines. This might be a response to SteamOS and the promise of playing PC games in the living room or the realization that you don’t need a monster motherboard to build a high-end system. Silverstone is no stranger to small case designs and the RVZ01 will not dissapoint.

Thermaltake is no stranger to the computer chassis market. With Reddot design awards for their Chaser A71 and Level 10 enclosures, they aren’t afraid to try different approaches to chassis design. With their new Core V71 Full Tower chassis, Thermaltake is offering an E-ATX capable enclosure that is both versatile and adaptable. Focusing on performance with either air or liquid cooling, the Core V71 offers an unprecedented level of flexibility and customization.

Modern people are more dependent on technology than ever before and I would guess that I do not know one person who could do anything without technology to support them. I have heard it argued that this fact is a bad thing and that humans may have caused themselves more harm than good because of it. I figure that is just stupid. The reality is we need more tech. We cannot ever possibly have enough. The people who struggle against tech or are even slow adopters are likely the single greatest cause of human suffering. The entirety of the dark ages can be attributed to that kind of thinking.

Since tech is so prevalent in our lives, and also because most people hardly ever stop “going,” it makes sense that we need our tech to move with us. The old roomful of computers doesn’t help at all when companies are global and their employees are on the move. Even people who do not work for big global companies need to be able to carry at least some data with them. Most people use their phones to store all kinds of things, like pictures, contact information, e-mails, and a lot more; but for people who really have a lot of data that needs to be portable, there is really only one great solution. Portable hard drives and thumb drives are the most common means of transporting data currently, and while thumb drives are more convenient due to size, they are also limited in storage and speed (even though there is a 1 terabyte USB 3.0 out there, it really isn’t cost effective for most people).